Credits

sbt was originally created by Mark Harrah (@harrah) in 2008. Most of the fundamental aspects of sbt, such as the Scala incremental compiler, integration with Maven and Ivy dependencies, and parallel task processing were conceived and initially implemented by Mark.

By 2010, when sbt 0.7 came out, many open-source Scala projects were using sbt as their build tool.

Mark joined Typesafe (now Lightbend) in 2011, the year the company was founded. sbt 0.10.0 shipped that same year. Mark remained the maintainer and most active contributor until March 2014, with sbt 0.13.1 as his last release.

Josh Suereth (@jsuereth) at Typesafe became the next maintainer of sbt.

In 2014, Eugene Yokota (@eed3si9n) joined Typesafe to co-lead sbt with Josh. This team carried the 0.13 series through 0.13.5 and started the trajectory to 1.0 as technology previews. By the time of Josh’s departure in 2015, after sbt 0.13.9, they had shipped AutoPlugin, kept sbt 0.13 in shape, and laid groundwork for sbt server.

Grzegorz Kossakowski (@gkossakowski) worked on a better incremental compiler algorithm called “name hashing” during his time on the Scala team at Typesafe. Name hashing became the default incremental compiler in sbt 0.13.6 (2014). Lightbend later commissioned Grzegorz to refine name hashing using a technique called class-based name hashing, which was adopted by Zinc 1. Another notable contribution from Grzegorz was hosting a series of meetups with @WarszawScaLa, and (with his arm in a sling the infamous blank-line problem.

In May 2015, Dale Wijnand (@dwijnand) became a committer from the community after contributing features such as inThisBuild and -=.

From June 2015 to early 2016, Martin Duhem (@Duhemm) joined Typesafe as an intern, working on sbt. During this time, Martin worked on crucial components such as making the compiler bridge configurable for Zinc, and code generation for pseudo case classes (which later became Contraband).

Around this time, Eugene, Martin, and Dale started the sbt 1.x codebase, splitting the code base into multiple modules: sbt/sbt, Zinc 1, sbt/librarymanagement, sbt/util, and sbt/io. The aim was to make Zinc 1, an incremental compiler usable by all build tools.

In August 2016, Dale joined the Tooling team at Lightbend. Dale and Eugene oversaw the releases 0.13.12 through 0.13.16, as well as the development of sbt 1.0.

In spring 2017, the Scala Center joined the Zinc 1 development effort. Jorge Vicente Cantero (@jvican) has contributed a number of improvements including the fix for the “as seen from” bug that had blocked Zinc 1.